Abu Dhabi and Dubai Blog

The financial crisis and now two criminal cases that have generated critical headlines in other countries have demonstrated that the emirates remain an absolute monarchy, where institutions are far less important than royalty and where the law is particularly capricious — applied differently based on social standing, religion and nationality, political experts and human rights advocates said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/middleeast/22uae.html

Even as the site was being excavated more than five years ago, during the halcyon days of the Dubai miracle, the Emirates construction business was disillusioning. Dogged by human and civil rights violations, the Pakistani, Bengali, Indian, and Chinese workers who poured the reinforced concrete, put in place the support beams, and manned the high cranes that still dominate the Dubai skyline were often subjected to unhygienic, overcrowded living quarters, unsafe working conditions, and withheld wages.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/81082807.html

This is a couple years old, but still a relevant and under reported topic. Brain Ross of ABC investigates:

Less than a week ago, a 15-year-old sex trade victim turned to Dubai Police to free her from her captors after she managed to escape with the assistance of a client. Captain Ahmad Obaid Bin Hadibah, Head of Dubai Police’s Department of Combating Human Trafficking, told Gulf News the section handled 15 cases of human trafficking in the first nine months of this year, which is close to the figure dealt with in the same period in 2008

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/crime/dubai-turns-up-heat-on-human-traffickers-1.512618

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=7402099

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

In similarity to a previous story from Dubai, Abu Dhabi’s civil authorities are now carrying out evictions on multi-family villas, allegedly for safety reasons.

Abu Dhabi Municipality launched a week-long campaign against makeshift homes on the weekend, but it has been clamping down on partitioned accommodation since late last summer. While many families have found themselves without anywhere to live, often at short notice, the municipality insisted that a formal policy of keeping only one family in each home did not exist.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090203/NATIONAL/97623614/1119

Opinion piece from the Guardian on social issues raised by the BBC’s decision film episode of hit British TV show in emirate’s leading city.

Though Dubai might be doing an effective job of presenting itself as a glitzy tourist destination, a place associated with mind-boggling decadence and the embodiment in glass and steel of the determination of the human spirit, the fact is, you may run out of fingers counting the ways in which filming even some of Doctor Who there is wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/garethmcleanblog/2009/jan/16/1